1. Technical Field
The present invention embodiments relate to live monitoring of information assets for information governance, and more specifically, to determining a status of an information asset and an information asset topology, and to dynamically detecting changes in the information asset topology.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Information assets are generally entities that provide data, and may include physical information assets and logical information assets. Physical information assets typically refer to physical machines (e.g., computer systems, etc.) that store and/or process (e.g., transform, etc.) data. These physical machines may be associated with data quality characteristics pertaining to the quality of data being provided, and operational characteristics pertaining to the underlying physical machine. Logical information assets generally refer to data entities providing data (e.g., a report, a document, an e-mail, etc.), and may be associated with data quality characteristics (since there is no physical machine for operational characteristics).
A logical information asset may receive data from various physical and/or other logical information assets. For example, a logical information asset in the form of a report may be constructed from data provided from various physical (e.g., computer systems, database systems, etc.) and/or logical (e.g., reports, documents, etc.) information assets. The data for the report may be processed for formatting or other purposes by various physical information assets prior to insertion in the report. The logical and physical information assets providing the data for the report basically form a hierarchy or topology that indicate the dependencies (or connectivity) of those information assets and the manner in which data flows from the information assets to the report.
The integrity of the resulting report is dependent on the integrity of the data received from the logical and physical information assets providing the data within the topology. When an information asset within the topology encounters a degradation of data quality, this degradation of data quality spreads to other information assets in the topology through which the data flows to the report. Accordingly, a degradation of data quality within one or more of the information assets in the topology causes the integrity of the resulting report to be degraded.